Some had developed darkened bark near the base.
She could not tell whether that meant life or decay.
She touched one.
Nothing.
Another.
Nothing.
At the forty-third cutting, her thumbnail scraped the bark.
Beneath the gray surface was a line of green.
Clara stopped breathing.
She scraped a second spot carefully.
Green.
Not brown.
Not dry.
Living tissue.
The stick was alive.
The next morning, Clara checked twelve more.
Eight showed green beneath the bark.
Four did not.
She did not celebrate.
Not yet.
By the first week of May, tiny buds appeared.
That was when Harold Vance returned with Walter Henderson and Tom Blackwell.
Tom laughed until Harold knelt in the mud.
The extension agent scraped bark from the base of a cutting.
Then another.
He found pale root initials pushing beneath the outer layer.
Willows could do that.
Harold knew it.
He had simply not believed Evelyn’s stored rods were still viable enough to establish under those conditions.
He straightened.
“They’re rooting.”
Tom laughed.
“Rotting?”
“Rooting.”
Harold repeated.
Tom’s smile disappeared.
Clara looked at the nearest cutting.
A tiny bud had begun opening.
Her eyes filled.
Walter Henderson immediately changed the tone of the visit.
“Interesting.”
He said.
Tom frowned.
“It’s brush.”
Harold shook his head.
“Not exactly.”
“What exactly?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That answer from Harold Vance surprised everyone.
Clara most of all.
Walter postponed final action on the property until June.
Not because he believed in willows.
Because uncertainty sometimes bought time as effectively as money.
The next six weeks changed the farm.
Not magically.
Unevenly.
Some cuttings failed.
Fourteen rotted.
Nine were washed loose during another rise in Miller’s Creek.
Clara replanted those she could recover.
One hundred seventy-three showed strong new growth by June.
Several sent up multiple shoots.
Their leaves were narrow and silver-green.
The roots spread quickly through the saturated upper soil.
What surprised Clara most was not that the willows grew.
It was where they grew best.
The wettest spots.
The depressions where water lingered after every rain.
Places Samuel Jennings had spent half his life trying to drain.
Clara began keeping records.
Date.
Rainfall.
Flood depth measured against fence posts.
Shoot length.
Survival.
Soil condition.
She used one of Evelyn’s old garden notebooks.
At first the entries were clumsy.
Then more precise.
Harold Vance noticed.
He visited every two weeks now.
Sometimes with his clipboard.
Sometimes without.
He stopped lecturing.
Started asking.
“How many survived in row four?”
“One less than last week.”
“Cause?”
“Vole damage, I think.”
“What about the upper row?”
“Drying faster.”
Harold crouched.
“You’re right.”
The upper edge performed worse than some lower sections.
The observation bothered him.
Then interested him.
Clara eventually asked:
“Do you hate being wrong?”